While it’s great to know what people want, when you give them what they want, you only give them a partial solution. The want is the symptom. But, when you address the need, you are addressing the underlying problem and providing a much more holistic solution.
In Part 2 of this series, I started discussing a customers wants versus their needs. I continue this list here.
Search engine marketing is an intense game of strategy, analysis, and patience. But, it’s also a game with multiple, sometimes even conflicting, goals. Depending on who you talk to you, some will tell you SEO is about rankings, while others will tell you it’s about conversions. It’s a classic political struggle trying to answer the question, “what will bring in the greatest profits?”
You need exposure to get the traffic that leads to new business. But, you need to be user friendly in order to convert the traffic you’re getting into new business. Which comes first, the chicken or the egg?
Engaging in competitive research before and during your SEO, PPC, Social Media, and Link Building campaigns is smart business. As they say, “information is power.”
But, too much information can also cause a handicap. It’s not too difficult to be so inundated with info. that you get information overload or conflicting advice. That leads to decision paralysis. You don’t know the right course of action to take, or you can wind up using good information to make bad judgment calls.
Below is the second set of questions from an interview I had given late last year. If you started this series with the introduction, you already know that the answers here differ from the answers given in the interview. One of the reasons I like written interviews is that it gives you a better opportunity to provide a more thorough and thought-filled answer. While these may not be life-changing questions, I hope they are at least thought provoking for the small business owner who doesn’t know a lot about SEO.
Here’s what’s new in the world of paid search advertising…
Google Changes Display of Top Position Ads
Apparently, Google is going to start putting Description Line 1 of a typical PPC ad in the headline of the Top 3 ads positions as long as the line ends with a punctuation mark. If they roll this out, it’s likely that competition for top position ads will grow and it will also affect ad copy strategies. It is not recommended that you merge the headline and description line as there will be a dash placed between the two in the first line of the ad.
Remember, while it may get more expensive to be in the Top 3 positions if this happens, we still only bid for position if it is advantageous to our overall marketing goals. As for ad copy, we may be more readily willing to be creative with our headlines since you could now put them in your description text and still have them show up big and blue on the page.
Back in 2002, Stanford published their Top 10 Guidelines To Establishing Web Credibility. Amazingly, these conditions for creating a credible website are just as relevant today as they were back then. Isn’t it funny how, with all of the advancements in site development and marketing, it all still comes back to the basics?
Below are the first five guidelines. I’ve provided some of my own additional thoughts and commentary and would be interested in hearing yours as well.
There was no commercial internet in the 80′s, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t reach into the recesses of our past to see that, everything we know now about SEO, we already knew back then. How? From the greatest, most magical music of all time: 80′s hair band glam rock!
They just don’t make music like this anymore, and it’s a shame. The sweet sound of rock’n'roll has never tasted better. All it takes is a reflective look at some of these song titles to realize that these guys knew their online marketing! (Though I’m sure they were all too wasted to even know it!)
I was thinking the other day about how influencing search engines is like influencing people. Short of brute force and absolute control, you can’t force anyone to do your bidding. With search engines, you might make a spam brute force attack, but that will be short lived. And absolute control? Well, no one has that, not even Google engineers, unless they all got together in a drunken binge and decided to reprogram the algorithm collectively.
Brute force and seeking absolute control are temporary measures at best. Eventually there will be an uprising and you’ll be shock-and-awed into a big heaping pile of disaster. Not a good way to go.
The 12-Step Program, developed by AA, has been used by countless individuals and copied by many organizations to help people get their lives on track. Here, we present the 12-Step Program for business owners when dealing with their online marketing campaigns.
It’s funny that we use terms like “expert” to describe an SEO. When looking for someone to help us get us top search engine rankings, we often look to see who the experts are. Last time I checked, we don’t look for “expert lawyers” or “expert doctors” or “expert plumbers”. No, we look for professionals.
However, we do often look for experts at certain subsets. Such as lawyers that are divorce experts, doctors that are cancer experts, plumbers that are… um, clog experts, and so on. So why do we look for SEO experts? Can anyone truly be an expert in all things related to SEO?
Perhaps. Just like doctors can be experts in multiple areas, lawyers can be experts in multiple fields of law, and plumbers can be experts in multiple types of… um, clogs, SEOs can be experts in several areas as well. But an expert in all of them? Hmmmm, not likely.
(Don't wait for the movie!)
E-Marketing Performance: Effective Strategies for Building, Optimizing & Marketing Your Website Online
